Reinvent the wheel?

Reinvent the wheel? 

A significant number of organizations have opted to build testing capabilities and quite a few others to build testing tools in-house for managing their software testing. Well, most of them are ‘convinced’ that their internal teams understand their business applications / products well for this activity to be ‘trusted’ to be executed on any external third-party tools. There is also another set of organizations which would want to build software testing tools to keep ‘support costs in rein’. Let us debate on both ‘justifications’.

Market pressures, invariably push development organizations to build software testing tools – so should an organization design & develop its own custom tools to meet its quality compliance by integrating industry best practices. Based on simple decision points:

a)  what are the complexities of the tool to be built?;
b) does the organization have the requisite expertise to not only build these tools, but also sustain continuous development keeping in pace with the ever-changing technologies? – one time development does not help; and
c) The timelines to build these tools wrt to release cycles.

 Dissecting this further, here are some advantages & disadvantages:

+advantages – complete control & custom built to meet business needs

- dis-advantages – development time, tool / product building expertise, continuous development for feature enhancements & technology compatibilities, building good UI, validation, meaningful & analytical reporting.

Buy or Build is indeed a dilemma!

Another set of challenge organizations need to ponder on is the significant investments in setting up test infrastructure & capabilities. Especially in the cloud-age there are on-demand / subscription-based models. Essentially meaning you only pay for what pieces of application / product you need to be tested for. After all, juggling time & expertise in the ‘build or buy’ models may not be the most appropriate option for ‘software-consuming’ organizations and IT captive units.

Outsourcing to experts who have years of expertise in building solutions & accelerators, frameworks, flexible engagement models, matured practices may perhaps be the answer for quite a few organizations in the mentioned segment!

‘Buy or Build’ or ‘Outsource to specialists’… to ‘Testing on the Cloud’….the options spoil you only to build greater QUALITY!!